Tag: book-reviews

Once The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict hits bookstores, I’ll be contractually obligated to endure the book tour circuit. My ideal stop? The Dick Cavett Show. Never mind that it no longer exists—I refuse to let reality get in the way of my delusions of grandeur.

There I’ll be, perched in a velvet chair, resplendent in a custom-tailored suit that exudes effortless literary gravitas. Cavett, ever the urbane host, will hold up my book and, in his signature droll tone, read my opening line: “I’ve been given the most self-defeating assignment imaginable: I must write a book about my recovery from compulsive writing so that the telling of my recovery violates the terms of my sobriety.”

He’ll pause, shaking his head in slow-motion admiration, as if momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer genius of what he’s just read. Then, locking eyes with me, he’ll say, “Mr. McMahon, I can say with the utmost confidence that this is the most stunning opening line in the history of literature. I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to have you here this evening.”

Not missing a beat, I’ll flash a knowing smile and reply, “Why thank you, Mr. Cavett, it is a pleasure to be here.”

And that, my friends, will be the apotheosis of my existence. At last, I will be whole, and I will never need to write anything again. 

Of course, this will never happen. Cavett is 88 years old and long retired, and I have about as much chance of appearing on his show as I do of discovering a lost Hemingway manuscript in my garage. But what’s the point of being a recovering writing addict if I can’t indulge in the occasional vanity-fueled fever dream?

There’s something to be said for vanity. It fuels ambition, sharpens our skills, and occasionally tricks us into believing we’re on the brink of something great. 

But there’s also a fine line between vanity and outright intoxication—the kind of fevered delusion that warps reality and blinds us to our own foolish pursuits. That line, precarious and often ignored, is summed up with brutal clarity by Lester Freamon in The Wire when he delivers a verbal gut punch to Jimmy McNulty, a cop too drunk on his own self-importance to see the inevitable crash ahead. Lester doesn’t sugarcoat it: “A parade? A gold watch? A shining Jimmy-McNulty-day moment, when you bring in a case so sweet everybody gets together and says, ‘Aw, shit! He was right all along. Should’ve listened to that man.’ The job won’t save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole, it won’t fill your ass up.”

Freamon’s words aren’t just for McNulty—they’re a public service announcement for every poor soul who believes that work, achievement, or applause will stitch together the holes in their existence. The writing demon, in particular, suffers from this same pathology. It whispers the same lie to every desperate novelist: that one book, the book, will be the great reckoning, the masterpiece that finally justifies the years of toil, obscurity, and rejection. That single, seismic literary triumph will be the author’s redemption arc, a vindication of every abandoned manuscript, every humiliating book-signing with three attendees (one of whom just needed to use the bathroom). The magnitude of this delusion is staggering.

Of course, if we define religion as an artist imposing their will on the culture so forcefully that they alter it for generations, then yes—certain artists have effectively founded religions. Take Sly Stone, whose music from the early ’70s didn’t just change the sound of funk, soul, and rock—it rewired the DNA of modern music entirely. His influence still echoes today, pulsing through the beats and harmonies of artists who weren’t even alive when There’s a Riot Goin’ On dropped. But did this cultural omnipresence make Sly Stone whole? Far from it. As Questlove’s documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) reveals, Sly Stone’s genius was too expansive and untamed to be neatly packaged. Yet, when the world saw him as a prophet, they tried to shackle him to their own expectations.

Every political movement, every special interest group wanted to claim a piece of his vision, to make him their voice. But Sly wasn’t a mascot—he was an artist, too grand and complex to be hijacked by anyone’s agenda. The weight of that expectation crushed him.

And that’s the thing about cultural prophets—whether they’re musicians, writers, or even McNulty-level workaholics. The world cheers them on when they’re building their temples, but those same temples can become cages. The parade never comes. The gold watch doesn’t arrive. The moment of glorious, all-encompassing validation? It’s a mirage. And the writing demon, ever hungry, never learns.

I’ve been given the most self-defeating assignment imaginable: I must write a book about my recovery from compulsive writing so that the telling of my recovery violates the terms of my sobriety.

The first symptoms of my affliction emerged in 1984, when I made the catastrophic mistake of reading A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece introduced me to Ignatius J. Reilly—a bloated, hot dog–devouring medievalist in a world that had tragically moved on from the 14th century. With the conviction of a deranged prophet, Ignatius stomped through New Orleans, denouncing modernity as if civilization itself were a personal affront. His absurdity was electrifying, a revelation. That was the moment I became possessed.

This wasn’t some harmless creative itch. This was a full-blown psychosis, the kind that whispers in your ear late at night and tells you this is your purpose. Worse, it took root at the exact moment I was an impressionable young man, inflated with the kind of intellectual vanity that only a 23-year-old can achieve. Watching Ignatius clash with reality, I had an epiphany—comedy wasn’t just entertainment; it was a weapon, a higher calling.

And then came the real disaster: I became convinced that I was meant to be a satirical novelist. Not in a vague, “wouldn’t that be cool” way, but in a divinely ordained, words-branded-into-my-flesh-with-a-cattle-prod kind of way. It was not a career choice. It was fate.

And so began my decades-long descent into literary madness.

***

To understand the bloated sense of self-importance that fueled my literary delusions, we need to revisit my place of employment—a temple of pretension where my ego found fertile ground. In the early 1980s, I funded my college education by peddling fine wines and imported beers at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, conveniently nestled just up the street from the Claremont Hotel on Ashby Avenue. It was the perfect setting for a young man to marinate in delusions of grandeur—surrounded by cork-sniffing sophisticates, armchair sommeliers, and the kind of clientele who believed a well-aged Bordeaux could double as a personality.

My coworkers were the sort of intellectual show-offs who could reduce an Oxford don to a stammering fool. They held advanced degrees in everything from literature to linguistics, chemistry to musicology, and they wore their academic pedigrees like badges of honor, brandishing them in a booze emporium as if the walls were lined with first editions rather than bottles of Chianti. They’d read Flaubert in the original French and sneered at English translations with the kind of disdain usually reserved for bad table wine. To them, working for any corporation that might dare to track their time was an act of existential surrender. Instead, they peddled fine spirits with an elitism so thick you could bottle it, cork it, and slap a vintage label on it. Their motto? “Service with a smirk.” 

I wanted to fit in, so I read voraciously, parroting these cultural heavyweights who could debate the nuances of two French Beaujolais for an entire shift while tossing out quotes from Kierkegaard or Camus. Soon enough, I was well on my way to becoming a full-blown snob, the kind who could turn a simple idea into a verbal labyrinth designed to impress rather than clarify. Slow hours found us planted by the registers dissecting the finer points of Nietzsche’s existential dread, Wagner’s bombastic compositions, and Kafka’s literary conundrums. I became intoxicated with my own intellect (mostly because I couldn’t afford the good wine) and used every fifty-dollar word in the book to convince myself I was superior to anyone with a steady paycheck. Working alongside this oddball crew was comfortable and, let’s face it, easy, but it lulled me into a delusion: I might not be wealthy or gainfully employed, but I was intellectually rich, or so I told myself.

By my mid-twenties, I was perfectly content to be the Nerf football-throwing, Borges-quoting slacker clerk who waxed poetic about the existential themes of Alberto Moravia and the tragic pessimism of Miguel de Unamuno while restocking shelves with Chianti. 

To further swell my already bloated ego, I spent my early twenties teaching college writing part-time, fancying myself some sort of literary prodigy destined for greatness. Whether I was regaling my students with pompous insights—laced with Nabokovian verbosity—or delivering the same drivel to wine store customers, I reveled in the delusion that I was the gravitational center of the universe. Every word I uttered, every pretentious quip, felt like a gift to the world—never mind that no one had asked for it.

Thus mired in a fever swamp of self-regard, I began my holy quest, an epic pilgrimage of delusion. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, I churned out novels at a terrifying speed, convinced that sheer productivity equaled genius. Wow, I must be good at this! I thought, mistaking volume for talent, like a man believing that eating more hot dogs makes him a Michelin-star chef.

The novels blur together now, a vast landfill of ambition outpacing execution, but three stand out for their sheer absurdity.

In 1989, I wrote Herculodge, a dystopian satire in which being overweight or displaying cellulite was illegal. This premise, better suited for a five-minute SNL skit, somehow sprawled into a 60,000-word novella, proving that even bad ideas can be tediously stretched to novel length.

In 1991, I produced Omnivore, the tragic tale of a man who could never find satisfaction eating his own food, forcing him to break into houses and devour leftovers from strangers’ refrigerators. Only through cat burglary could he achieve satiety—a premise that sounds brilliantly unhinged in a John Cheever short story but unbearable at novel length. Unfortunately, I chose the latter, cramming 10 percent story into 90 percent padding, like an overstuffed burrito of literary excess.

In 1992 while teaching college in the California desert, I lived next to a man who was less a neighbor and more an anthropological oddity—a legal brief-reading, Kenny G-blasting exhibitionist who pranced around the apartment pool in custom-print Speedos while slowly tanning himself into a deep mahogany hue. He became the unwitting inspiration for The Man Who Stopped Dating, my novel about an uncouth playboy who receives a vengeful fruit basket from one of his scorned lovers. A single bite from a deliquescing mango leaves him cursed with a permanent stench, a condition suspiciously similar to fish odor syndrome (trimethylaminuria, for the medically inclined). His hero’s journey becomes a desperate quest to rid himself of the smell, find redemption, and maybe—just maybe—salvage his soul.

Convinced I had spun pure gold, I went all in—I adapted the story into a screenplay and shelled out a cool two grand to have Hollywood script guru Linda Seger take a scalpel to it. Her verdict? Great premise. Catastrophic structure. Apparently, my masterpiece wasn’t so much a movie as a sprawling narrative train wreck, gasping for subplots, character depth, and the basic bones of a coherent story.

But did that deter me? Of course not. In my fevered delusion, the mere act of consulting with Hollywood’s premier script doctor meant I was practically in—one fortuitous lunch meeting away from a bidding war over my genius. I could already hear studio execs brawling over my brilliance, assuming they could hold their breath long enough to endure a script about a man who smells like low tide.

In reality, I wasn’t Hemingway. I wasn’t even a second-rate Elmore Leonard. I was Rupert Pupkin, the delusional failure from The King of Comedy, rehearsing for a fame that was never coming. The difference? At least he had the decency to keep his fantasies in his mother’s basement.